The Big East Is Still Paying for a Fumble

Beginning Tuesday, teams and fans will converge on Madison Square Garden for the 32nd Big East Conference men’s basketball tournament. Since the conference began using the Garden for its annual carnival in 1983, the tournament has become a popular launching pad for March Madness.

Last year, a record 11 men’s teams were invited from the Big East to the N.C.A.A. tournament, and Connecticut went on to win the national title.

But this year’s tournament takes place amid volatile conference shifts that make a mockery of geography and threaten the conference’s integrity and possibly its very survival.

The Big East was formed as a basketball-only conference in 1979, and it had a great Plan A.

Plan A was Dave Gavitt’s dream of creating a superconference on the East Coast — Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Washington — that would dominate college basketball.

Gavitt’s dream became the Big East and the Big East tournament, which continues to sell out the Garden 29 years later. There was no Plan B — rather, no Plan F, for football. Now the conference is paying the price for ignoring the implications of not having big-time football in its portfolio. The conference has become a bad-luck ship, losing crew members and passengers left and right.

Miami left, Boston College left. West Virginia is leaving, Pittsburgh is leaving. The most crushing blow of all is that Syracuse is leaving. West Virginia will play in the Big 12, Pitt and Syracuse in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

No conference has played better basketball than the Big East; other conferences have played college basketball longer, but none better. In 1985, the Big East had three teams reach the Final Four, and two played for the national championship, with Villanova winning the title.

Success invariably breeds overconfidence. This may be why the Big East founders were so opposed to having Plan B. Who needed Plan B when Plan A was working so fabulously? They did not contemplate a situation in which the Big East would be scrambling, in which basketball wouldn’t be enough to sustain the conference.

“I think that people for the most part didn’t understand how big and important football was,” the former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese said in a recent interview. “It really drove the cart.”

If the architects of the conference had known then what they know now, what would they have done differently?

Photo

Billy Goodwin and St. John’s won the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden in 1983.Credit
G. Paul Burnett/Associated Press

Tranghese said: “In hindsight, you say the league had 20-something pretty good years when you look at it, but now with what’s going on — you look at it in hindsight, I think the question is pretty interesting. I don’t know how to answer it.”

For all of the league’s success, it now realizes, perhaps too late, that football is king. No matter how many cheering fans, no matter how many teams are invited to the N.C.A.A. tournament, without a hefty television contract for football, the Big East will fall from the ranks of the 1 percent of the college sports elite.

Tranghese tried to tell the Big East’s university presidents and athletic directors as much as early as 1989 when he was Gavitt’s assistant. Gavitt thought the conference needed to bring Penn State into the fold. Penn State was an independent at the time, looking for the security of a conference.

The membership voted no, with St. John’s, Villanova and Georgetown leading the resistance. At the end of the meeting, Gavitt asked Tranghese what he thought about the decision. “I said, ‘We will all rue the day about this decision,’ ” Tranghese said. “I understood how big football was. I didn’t understand how big it was going to become.

“At that point, the Big East had so much success in the ’80s, everybody sort of forgot about it. But I felt looking back on the history of the Big East, that was probably the biggest mistake we made.”

Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1989, and the move immediately set off a tidal wave that in many ways continues today: the Southeastern Conference began talking expansion, the A.C.C. began talking expansion and for the first time, Syracuse and B.C. began talking about leaving the Big East to find a home in a strong football conference (they were independents in the sport).

Tranghese was hired to follow Gavitt in 1990. In 1991, the Big East began playing football. The league had no choice. It had to look at football or break up.

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The conference presidents commissioned a study to determine whether the Big East should stay intact or disband. The turmoil in the college football establishment was cresting — you were in or you were out. The Big East had taken in Miami to get the big-name football program it desperately needed. Now there was pressure to take on more football-playing universities: Rutgers, West Virginia, Virginia Tech.

The study recommend that the Big East stay together. Tranghese had misgivings even then. “I don’t think they envisioned any idea of all this jumping around taking place,” he said.

“I thought at that point, our league should have given very serious consideration to separating,” Tranghese said. “From where I was sitting, the difficulty of keeping everything together — some people playing football, some people not playing football — was a challenge.”

The Big East added Rutgers and West Virginia in 1995, Virginia Tech in 2000.

Big East basketball remained solid, but football was mostly a quagmire of mediocrity — as it is today. When the conference began to negotiate a new television contract, Miami was on probation, “so we got hammered,” Tranghese said.

Photo

Dave Gavitt built a basketball superconference, but the Big East did not embrace football.Credit
Stephan Savoia/Associated Press

Miami and Boston College decided to leave in 2003. Their departures, and eventually that of Virginia Tech, were devastating.

“For me, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” Tranghese said. “It wasn’t fun. I saw a lot of people who were hurt by it. People’s existence in athletics was being threatened, and I just wasn’t willing to go through that again.”

Tranghese retired in 2009. He knew there would be more expansion and didn’t want to go through it.

“I knew it was coming; the handwriting was on the wall,” he said. “I didn’t know if it was going to be a day, a week or a month, but I knew it was coming and I just refused to sit there and go through it again.”

The Big East will negotiate a new television contract next year. Even before Pittsburgh and Syracuse announced that they would be leaving for the A.C.C., the Big East’s TV contract lagged behind the A.C.C., Pacific-12, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC packages.

The losses of Syracuse and Pitt were more devastating than the Boston College and Miami departures.

“That was a tremendous blow,” Tranghese said. “Syracuse has been at the heart of Big East basketball.

“I have watched Jim Boeheim coach, and I can’t even comprehend Jim coaching in the A.C.C. It’s like a foreign thought. To be honest with you, my fondest hope is I’d love to see Syracuse win the national championship and Jim get the heck out because I hope he never coaches a game in that league.”

Not only that, Boeheim may be on the bench in Madison Square Garden as an A.C.C. coach.

There was talk among A.C.C. officials about holding a future tournament at the Garden. Who knows how much of that is trash-talking — dancing on the Big East shield — and how much is legitimate market share now that Boston College, Syracuse and Pittsburgh are in the A.C.C. fold.

While the adults who oversee this multibillion-dollar enterprise preach sportsmanship to young athletes, the backroom business is more predatory than ever.

“Maybe eventually, there will be a backward revolution where people wind up being with people where there is some geographic sense to it all,” Tranghese said. “It just seems that there’s this arms race to get bigger and more powerful.”

Sports mirrors real life.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on March 5, 2012, on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: The Big East Is Still Paying for a Fumble. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe